EGU21-13012, updated on 17 Apr 2023
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-13012
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

On the Use of Satellite Observations to Fill Gaps in the Halley Station Total Ozone Record

Lily Zhang1, Susan Solomon1, Kane Stone1, John Burrows4, Steve Colwell2, Joshua Eveson2, David Haffner3, Anna Jones2, Natalya Kramarova3, Gordon Labow3, Pieternel Levelt5, Paul Newman3, Jonathan Shanklin2, Mark Weber4, and Catherine Wilka1
Lily Zhang et al.
  • 1Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Cambridge, MA, United States
  • 2British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, United Kingdom
  • 3National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States
  • 4University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
  • 5Delft University of Technology, Department of Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Delft, Netherlands

Measurements by the Dobson ozone spectrophotometer at the British Antarctic Survey’s (BAS) Halley research station form a record of Antarctic total column ozone that dates back to 1956. Due to its location, length, and completeness, the record has been, and continues to be, uniquely important for studies of long-term changes in Antarctic ozone. However, a crack in the ice shelf on which it resides forced the station to abruptly close for eight months and [SC-UB1]  led to a gap in its historic record.  We develop and test a method for filling in the record of Halley total ozone by combining and bias-correcting overpass data from a range of different satellite instruments. Tests suggest that our method reproduces the monthly ground-based Dobson total ozone values to within 20 Dobson units.  We show that our approach improves on the overall performance as compared to simply using the raw satellite average or an individual instrument. The method also provides a check on the consistency of the automated Dobson used at Halley after 2018 compared to earlier manual Dobson data, and suggests a significant difference between the two.  The filled Halley dataset provides further support that the Antarctic ozone hole is healing not only during September, but also in January.

How to cite: Zhang, L., Solomon, S., Stone, K., Burrows, J., Colwell, S., Eveson, J., Haffner, D., Jones, A., Kramarova, N., Labow, G., Levelt, P., Newman, P., Shanklin, J., Weber, M., and Wilka, C.: On the Use of Satellite Observations to Fill Gaps in the Halley Station Total Ozone Record, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-13012, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-13012, 2021.